18.12.1997
Jesus: man and Myth
Christian doctrine portrays Jesus as a creepy, other-worldly figure; a man-god utterly indifferent to the savage occupation of the Jewish homeland by imperial Rome. But Jesus did not die in order to fulfil some divine plan. Nor was he betrayed by the Jewish people. Jesus was no ‘Christian’, writes Jack Conrad, but an apocalyptic revolutionary whose message was universal human liberation
The official religion of the United Kingdom is a nationalised form of Christianity. Elizabeth Windsor, the monarch, is head of the Church of England and Tony Blair a practising cult member (when not receiving communion at his wife’s Roman Catholic Church). Archbishops and bishops of the Church of England, the lords spiritual, sit by “ancient usage and statute” in parliament. Royal weddings and state funerals are conducted according to Christian ritual. Parliament starts business with morning prayers and in state schools our children are taught the falsehoods of the New Testament as verified fact. Jesus is portrayed by church, state and school, as a miracle-making man-god, who was born of a virgin and took human form in order to fulfil divine plan and found a new religion.
All this - and the continued hold religion still has over many people - makes it vital to intellectually challenge the Jesus myth and reveal the real historical man. Communist politics is about more than strikes, trade union positions and street demonstrations. A prerequisite for anything decisive is securing ideological hegemony. By definition that involves as much the past as the present. History, therefore, is a weapon, either for revolution or reaction.
Where we need the unvarnished truth about history with all its different social formations, antagonisms, violent ruptures and popular freedom movements, our rulers need mystification, seamless apologetics and resignation. To maintain and reproduce domination in the realm of ideas, the bourgeoisie employ, flatter and promote all manner of philosophers, academics, theologians, journalists and broadcasters. These dons and divines, pundits and post-modernists manufacture or/and propagate a history which downplays or denies those below. Capitalism is presented as the natural order or the last word in civilisation. Piecemeal change is their totem. Revolution only brings disaster and disappointment. Revolutions and revolutionaries are with equal disingenuousness sanitised or demonised.
Hence in Britain the revolutionary past of modern capitalism is denied by being remade as other. Aristocratic cavaliers are the dashing heroes of biography, film and novel. Roundheads become dour proto-Stalinites. Charles I is bumbling, but well-meaning, inoffensive and courageous, Oliver Cromwell narrow-minded and bigoted. What of our dead leaders? Where not held directly responsible for the gulags, they and their ideas are transformed into safe objects for plagiarism or point scoring. Lenin, Trotsky, Luxemburg and Engels - above all Marx - have all been turned from revolutionary politicians into mere interpreters of the world by bourgeois academia.
Of course, taming such intellectual lions as these is difficult. Deceased they may be. But their thoughts live; and not only in Progress Publishers volumes. For millions of working class partisans Marxism is the science of liberation. That unexorcised material threat explains why the ruling class and its ideological machine churns out, year by year, hundreds of books which neuter, distort or demolish Marxism.
Communists must, and will, defend our own. We must also, being part of a class uniquely interested in the truth, seek to turn the personalities of ‘official’ history back onto their feet - not least those who in some way expressed the age-old popular striving for freedom. In the great tinselled and mystical, drunk and pious, commercial and anarchic run-up to Christmas, that especially applies to Jesus, who was - or so the Latin story goes - born 1,997 years ago on December 25 in the little town of Bethlehem (the orthodox tradition deploys a different date).
Interestingly some ‘honest’ Christians refuse to recognise or celebrate Christmas. Under the Commonwealth, a god-fearing Cromwell, suppressed it as devil-born heathenism, along with many saints’ days. According to noted historian Christopher Hill, he “held the mass to be idolatrous, and both popery and prelacy in his view were repressive systems which might prevent Christian verity from expressing itself” (C Hill God’s Englishman Harmondsworth 1975, p205). Here Cromwell was merely following the teachings of Luther and Calvin and pressing home the ongoing attack against the habits and mores of the old self-contained medieval society. Traditionally “religious festivals measured out the seasons of the year” and gave the masses an opportunity to dance wildly, drink to excess, have extra-marital sex and generally enjoy themselves (C Hill Society and puritanism London 1969, p202). Commercial society could not afford the 100 plus feast days nor countenance such disreputable goings-on.
Today in Scotland, the Free Presbyterians, the ‘wee-frees’, also consider Christmas pagan. They are quite right. Most saints’ days were thinly veiled pre-Christian carry-overs. Christmas itself originated as an orgiastic communistic celebration of the winter solstice (eg, the Roman Saturnalia). It was only in the early 4th century that the western church decided to take December 25 as the “date for the nativity” (H Chadwick The early church Harmondsworth 1975, p126). The church could rename the day. But it could never totally eliminate its pre-Christian form and content - holly, mistletoe, the yule log, giving presents, getting together and getting high.
Of course, Christians who condemn Christmas are far from scientific or even rational. They claim that each and every word of the bible is literally true and comes from the lips of an all-knowing, all-powerful god. Yet both the New and the Old Testament are very human documents. Indeed to understand Jesus as a real person it is vital to grasp the evolution and contradictory final form of the Hebrew cannon. Each book of the Tannakh - what Christians call the Old Testament - is a palimpsest. Over many years, successive generations revised and modified the accumulated myths and taboos of the Hebrew tribes. It was only after the Babylonian exile in the 5th century BC that the Jewish religion took anything like the form we would recognise today.
Before the destruction of Jerusalem by the Babylonians, the Jews were no different from the numerous Semitic tribes that inhabited the Middle East. They had many deities: “Our fathers worshipped idols on the other side of the river.” The confederacy of 11 Hebrew tribes were in their beginnings nomadic. For a living they relied on their sheep and goats. In common with other such herdsmen they engaged in irregular trade, and what was closely associated at the time, armed raiding. Nomadic herdsmen must always be prepared for war and never lack the opportunity; robbery thus became “a permanent institution, a regularly employed method of obtaining a livelihood” (K Kautsky The materialist conception of history New Haven 1988, p280).
Biblical tales of their wanderings owe much to later propagandists and embellishers. No doubt they camped in the shadow of Mount Sinai - the tribes would appear to have first come together “in the deserts of Sinai and Transjordan” (I Halevi A history of the Jews London 1987, p34). Perhaps they clashed with the Egyptians - though only the priest-caste of Levis, the so-called twelth tribe, show any sign of Egyptianisation. Moses is considered by some authorities to be Egyptian in background. However, it was only after they invaded and settled in Palestine (Canaan) did the Hebrew community enter history and take definite form as a settled agricultural and mercantile nation.
Amongst primitive peoples the notion of divinity is altogether amorphous but earth-bound; in general, religion at this stage reflected humanity’s domination by the alien “forces of nature” (F Engels MECW Vol 25, Moscow 1987, p301). Mountains, rivers, groves of trees may be considered the home of particularly powerful spirits (among the Hebrews many were called El). Nomads often carried their gods with them in the form of sacred objects - peculiarly shaped stones or pieces of wood. The bible story of the Ark of the Covenant - a box in which god dwells - is an echo of these times. Fetishistic objects or teraphim brought divine protection, rain and military victories.
So the gods of the Hebrews seem at first to have been nothing more than fetishes, similar to the ones Jacob’s wife, Rachel, stole as they fled from her father Laban (Genesis xxxi, 19). As with the Zoroastrian Persians and later the Islamic Arabs, the monotheism of the Hebrews was the result not of philosophical sophistication, but sudden contact with and adoption of a “higher urban culture” (K Kautsky Foundations of Christianity New York 1972, p202).
From 724 BC onwards the Hebrew people went from being conquerors to being conquered. First the Assyrians and then the Babylonians invaded. But instead of plundering, taxing and garrisoning the vanquished land and then suffering the inevitable uprising when an opportune moment arose, both the Assyrians and Babylonians tried to make their gains secure by deporting the social elite - the great landowners, priests and the most wealthy. Under the Assyrians the northern Hebrew tribes in Samaria disappear from history. Later many of these people were to become Christian and later again muslim. The Palestinian Arabs of today are surely the direct descendants of these ancient Hebrews.
However the fate of Judea in the south was somewhat different. The Babylonians “carried away” into captivity the king, his mother, his wives and all the “mighty of the land” (II Kings xxiv, 12-6). Jeremiah also tells how the Babylonians only “left the poor of the people, which had nothing in the land of Judah”, to whom they redistributed the land (so as to extract tribute). Those mainly illiterate peasants, the ‘people of the land’, who remained lacked internal dynamic towards a higher culture. They married Canaanites and other ‘outsiders’ and continued to worship and sacrifice at a local shrine (‘bethel’ or house of god).
Judaism developed in exile. The elite was awestruck by Babylon, its magnificent buildings and its advanced ideas - which in religion had long ago abandoned geo-specific deities and was in all likelihood moving towards some kind of monotheism. The Hebrew priests were soon aping and adapting from the Babylonians. Many Jewish notions of worship and biblical myths owe their origins to the 50 years of exile - the Garden of Eden, the Tower of Babel, the flood, etc. If they had stayed in Babylon longer, the Judaeans would undoubtedly have become fully assimilated. However the Babylonian empire collapsed before Persian invasion - Babylon was taken without resistance. The Persian king Cyrus decided to permit the Judaeans (the Jews) to return to their homeland. The elite were to serve as his vassals. Jerusalem and its temple was rebuilt as the religious-administrative centre of a subordinate social order. From Jerusalem the elite oversaw the extraction of tribute from the local population and management of the Jewish diaspora (successful Jewish traders established themselves in colonies from one end of the Persian empire to another).
When the priesthood came back from exile in 538 BC they carried with them a more abstract sense of the divine - monotheism. Being artificial, the new religion had to rely on “deception and falsification” (F Engels MECW Vol 24, Moscow 1989, p427). The old sacred texts were “rewritten, codified, expurgated, annotated and completed” (I Halevi A history of the Jews London 1987, p29). Here the scribes and priests under Ezra and his successors had a great advantage. They had dropped the ancient Hebrew alphabet - still used by the Samaritans of Nablus in their liturgy - in favour of the square alphabet of the Aramaeans, in which Hebrew is written today. The possibilities for distortion and outright doctoring opened up by the transliteration from one alphabet to another were immense. Judaism was invented. Only a few shards of the previous tradition survive.
To establish ideological hegemony and acceptance of the Jewish elite, the old tribal polytheism was ruthlessly purged. Apart from the temple at Jerusalem all other centres of worship along with their fetishes were forcibly put down as pagan abominations. “I am the Lord; that is my name; and my glory will I not give to another, neither my praise to graven images” (Isaiah xiii, 8). The Jewish god therefore did not arise from philosophy, from the emergence of one god beyond all existing gods, but from the triumph of the god of Jerusalem over rivals. Moreover Jehovah was both universal and parochial. Jehovah, or Yahweh, was the god of all humanity and yet was also claimed as the ancestral and national god of the Jews. “The first shall be Zion” (Isaiah xli, 25).
As will be readily appreciated, that does not mean the rewritten Old Testament was simply fiction. On the contrary it reflected, in however distorted a manner, the class antagonism between the subordinate elite and the masses: ie, the domination of social forces or history, over humanity. Marx succinctly explained in his fourth thesis on Feuerbach how the “secular basis lifts off from itself and establishes itself in the clouds as an independent realm”, because of “the inner-self and intrinsic-contradictions” of the secular base (K Marx MECW Vol 5, Moscow 1976, p7). Religion is a social product. As Persian vassals, the elite had no army - only a religious police. They had to rely on remaking and then maintaining the Jews as a sect-people. Fear of god had to impose obedience. The evolution of Jehovah was therefore bound up with military weakness and class struggle. Those peasants who had married ‘foreign women’ were initially excluded from the ‘assembly of Israel’. Priests formed themselves into an hereditary theocracy which extracted tribute (surplus product) through the system of compulsory pilgrimage, sacrifice and offering - the dominant social relationship. Temple taxes brought fabulous wealth to Jerusalem and “kept large numbers profitably employed” (K Kautsky Foundations of Christianity New York 1972, p271). Hence in the god Jehovah we can gain an insight into the Jewish people and the evolution of their real life processes. The same applies to Christianity and Jesus: only with the proviso that besides the New Testament (written between 70 and 100AD), we have relatively abundant contemporary literary records, not least those of the Romans.
Jesus, in the New Testament, is credited with supernatural powers. Even the most ‘progressive’ Church of England bishop believes or pretends that he worked wonders and roused the minds of millions. Suffice to say before the end of the 18th century, Edward Gibbon pointed out in his Decline and fall, with what Kautsky called “delicate irony”, that though the “laws of nature were frequently suspended for the benefit of the church”, the sages of Greece and Rome “appeared unconscious of any alteration in the moral or physical government of the world” (quoted in K Kautsky Foundations of Christianity New York 1972, p23). From the moment of his birth to the moment of his death no pagan or Jewish observer devoted even one written word on him.
Supposedly, the first non-Christian to mention Jesus - “the king who was never king” - was said to have been Josephus Flavius, in the so-called ‘Slavonic version’ of the Jewish war and the 18th and 20th books of the Jewish antiquities (B Radice [ed], Josephus The Jewish war Harmondsworth 1981, p470). Though the words of this pro-Roman aristocratic Jew and contemporary of Jesus were much valued by Christians, all serious scholars nowadays admit that they were a 3rd century interpolation. There are many other such examples of forgery.
One of two conclusions broadly present themselves. Either Jesus did not exist - John Allegro, fantastically in my opinion, says the whole Jesus story was a “fictional” cover for a secret drug-using cult (see JM Allegro The sacred mushroom and the cross London 1970). Or, as is the case, there were so many messiahs (ie, christs in the Greek tongue) that, while others were given passing reference, he did not rate a mention. Josephus rails against “religious frauds and bandit chiefs” who joined forces in an attempt to win freedom from Rome. He also writes sneeringly of an “Egyptian false prophet” who, posing as a seer, “collected about 30,000 dupes” and, after leading them around the desert, took them to the Mount of Olives; “and from there was ready to force entry into Jerusalem” so as to seize “supreme power”. Roman heavy infantry scattered the “mob” and killed or captured “most of his followers” (B Radice [ed], Josephus The Jewish war Harmondsworth 1981, p147).
Palestine was at the crossroads of Middle Eastern civilisations. That is what made it a land of milk and honey for the Hebrews and a strategic target for the superpowers of the ancient world. As we have said, from the 8th century BC one invasion followed another. Assyrians, Babylonians, Medes and Persians, Macedonian Greeks and finally, in the 1st century BC, the Romans. During power vacuums there were brief interludes of independence, as for example under the Maccabees. But all in all the Jews became an oppressed nationality, which in turn bred “national fanaticism to the highest degree” (K Kautsky Foundations of Christianity New York 1972, p227). With the Romans there was a widespread feeling, particularly amongst the poor, that the last-times had arrived. A new communistic world was ready to be born along with class retribution against the oppressors and their agents. Family and everyday relations were shaped by the palpable idea of an impending apocalypse.
National feelings and class interests were mediated through the prism of religious faction. The rallying slogan of the “downtrodden and disaffected” was loyalty to god and his law (H Schonfield The pentecost revolution London 1985, p31). Those below ranged themselves not only against Rome but quislings who were prepared to cooperate with them, namely the royal Herodians - who were virtually alone in being pro-Roman - and the Sadducees, the conservative priest-caste and big landowners. That is not to say the masses were united behind a single party. Three main, though highly fragmented and overlapping, opposition currents, existed.
Firstly, the Pharisees (rabbis or lay religious teachers). In general they were cautious middling types who guarded and developed a living Judaism against upper class sacrilege and dry-as-dust dogmatism.
Secondly, apocalyptic revolutionaries like the Zadokites or Essenes of Dead Sea scroll fame. These devouts fasted, prayed for and awaited god’s divine intervention and a messiah. On the day of deliverance and judgement the elect rise from their graves and Rome is cast down in a mighty conflagration. Then, following god’s ordinance, the messiah, born of David’s royal line, would rule a new - communistic - world order from the holy city of Jerusalem.
Thirdly, the Zealots, or the militant wing of the Pharisees. Here were practical revolutionaries, terrorists and skilled guerrilla fighters. These republicans believed that god helps those who help themselves.
Albeit sketchy, that is the Jewish religio-political spectrum.
Pharisee preachers and messianic prophets turned biblical texts against the Herodian aristocracy and the Sadducee priest-caste. Their Hellenised life-style and subservience to the ‘beast’- ie, Rome - were denounced as an abomination against god and religious law. Because of their sinful ways Jehovah no longer brought Israel victory, but punishment in the form of poverty and humiliation. Roman emperors, governors and procurators were certainly arrogant, rapacious and brutal. They were determined to extract the maximum surplus from conquered territories. Taxation and other forms of tribute left the masses on the verge of starvation. Tax collectors - ‘publicans’ - used torture and sold whole families into slavery. To cap it all, the Romans were not averse to parading images of their god-emperor in Jerusalem - sacrilege for any Jew. They even proposed in 39-40 AD to erect a statue of Gaius Caligula in their temple. No wonder the Jewish populus loathed the Romans much like the Poles loathed the Nazis.
For 200 years Palestine was the hotbed of revolt within the Roman empire - the Zealot uprisings of 6AD and 66-73AD and the Bar-Kokhba kingdom in the 2nd century being outstanding examples. However if Palestine was the Roman’s Ireland, Galilee in the far north, where Jesus grew from childhood, was its Derry. Set against the nationalist-religious background we have just outlined, the New Testament Jesus is therefore a very strange person, to say the least. Nowhere does he challenge or even question Roman occupation of Judaea and indirect rule of Galilee (at the time of Jesus it had a pro-Roman Jewish satrap - Herod Antipas). Instead he appears to positively love the Roman tyrant. It is the Pharisees who earn his ire and rebuke. Jesus even urges fellow Jews to dutifully pay Roman taxes: “Render unto Caesar ...” Frankly that would have been akin to lecturing the people of Glasgow about the benefit of Thatcher’s poll tax. And yet incongruously he manages to gain an enthusiastic following among the rural and urban poor.
His birth and infancy are even harder to swallow. A Roman census in what is now year zero - there was one in 6AD - unbelievably requires subjects of the empire to travel to the places of their birth. If such a stipulation has been made, the movement of people would surely have caused complete chaos. In fact all the Romans required was registration at one’s normal place of residence (the census was for tax-raising purposes and was deeply resented by the population). Galileans would not have been affected of course. Anyway, or so the story goes, Joseph, the ‘father’ of Jesus, and his heavily pregnant, but virgin wife, trek all the way from Nazareth in the far north to Bethlehem in Judaea. There, guided by a wondrous star, shepherds and wise men shower the child with praise and gifts, just before king Herod, the father of Herod Antipas, orders the massacre of the innocents. But only after Joseph and Mary, having been warned by an angel, flee towards Egypt. All pure invention, as was the ability of the young Jesus to outwit temple priests in theology when he visits Jerusalem.
Here, as with much else, we have the heavy hand of propaganda and later Greek rewriters. In general it has to be said that the gospels - written between 30 and 70 years after Jesus’ death - display profound ignorance of the elementary facts of Jewish life. Moreover they become progressively anti-Jewish. In John, the last of the four gospels, Jesus is a pro-Roman, Mithras-like man-god, who was put to death solely due to the collective guilt of the Jewish people. In this tradition he knowingly sacrifices himself in sadomasochistic fashion in order to atone for the sins of humanity.
Yet, by drawing on what we know of the Jews and removing obvious invention, we can arrive at a much more probable version of events. Charismatic, well educated and driven, Jesus was certainly a Pharisee (teacher and preacher). In gospel passages which show enmity to Pharisees, such as over the practice of Sabbath-healing, the word ‘Pharisees’ “has clearly been inserted, where the original story had ‘Sadducees’” (H Maccoby Revolution in Judaea London 1973, p139). He came to believe, during the course of his ministry, that he was not only a prophet, but the messiah (or ‘anointed one’) who would deliver the Jewish people from Rome (and end the days of the robber empires). Jesus therefore spoke of himself as the ‘Son of David’ or ‘Son of god’ (by which was certainly not meant man-god - a blasphemous concept for Jews). That is why two of the gospels - Matthew and Luke - are interesting in that they leave in earlier accounts, which had gone to great lengths in order to prove that through Joseph he was by biological lineage directly related to David: ie, the last great king of Israel 600 hundred years before him. The prophet Micah had predicted that the messiah would be born in Bethlehem like David. Jesus, or his early propagandists, were by the birth-story proclaiming him to be royal and the lawful king of Israel. It was like someone announcing he was the Saxon king of England against Hanovarian upstarts - except in the time of Jesus it had explicitly revolutionary connotations.
Jesus’s claim to be ‘king of the Jews’ was political. He was putting himself forward as the leader of a popular revolution that would bring forth the ‘kingdom of god’. This was no pie in the sky when you die. The slogan ‘kingdom of god’ was of this world and was widely used by Zealots and other anti-Roman forces. It conjured up for Jews an idealised vision of the old theocratic system - which could only be realised by smashing the Romans. But in the new-days it will be the poor who receive and the rich who suffer ... “Blessed be ye poor: for yours is the kingdom of god! Woe unto ye that are rich! Woe unto ye that are full for ye shall hunger! Woe unto ye that laugh for ye shall mourn and weep!” (Luke). Class retribution was not to be confined to Israel alone. The Jews were god’s revolutionary vanguard. Through them Jesus’ plan was for a universal utopia. From Jerusalem a new “world theocracy”, with Jesus at its head, would redeem “all nations” (H Schonfield The passover plot London 1977, p24). There onwards peace reigns; swords would be beaten into ploughshares and the wolf would lie down with the lamb.
Jesus was no Zealot. Militantly republican - ‘god is our only ruler and lord’ - they were committed to a realistic, long-term guerrilla war against the Romans. Formally the odds were hopeless. However their ‘zeal’ would triumph, as had Judas Maccabaeus, Samson, Gideon and Joshua before them. God would lend aid, but they expected no miracles. The Zealots led the Jewish population in the 66-73 AD revolt which ended in the heroic last stand at Masada. Rather than surrender to the Romans, the Zealot fighters under Eleazar ben Jair preferred suicide. Jesus was an apocalyptic revolutionary similar to John the Baptist. He “believed in the miraculous character of the coming salvation, as described in the writings of the scriptural prophets” (H Maccoby Revolution in Judaea, London 1973, pp157-8). Jesus was not interested in military strategy or tactics. Rome would be beaten without conventional or guerilla war. Nevertheless, though Jesus did not train his followers in the use of arms, five of his 12 disciples came from the ranks of the Zealots and retained their guerrilla nicknames (including Peter ‘Barjonah’ - ‘outlaw’; Simon -the Zealot; James and John - the ‘sons of thunder’; and Judas Iscariot - the ‘dagger-man’).
This is not surprising. Jesus was no pacifist: “I come not to send peace but a sword” (Matthew x, 34). Liberation would have a military aspect; though primarily depending on supernatural intervention. There would be a decisive battle where a tiny army of the righteous destroy overwhelmingly superior forces. In the bible Gideon fought and won with only 300 men. So the methods of Jesus and the Zealots differed, but were not entirely incompatible. The Zealots were unlikely to have been hostile to Jesus. His mass movement would at the very least have been seen by them as sea in which they could swim - ie, an opportunity. Jesus was therefore not isolated from Jewish life and the political turmoil that surrounded him. The notion that he opposed violence is a later Christian invention designed to placate Roman hostility and assuage their fears that the followers of the dead man-god were dangerous sub-versives. Jesus could never have said: “Resist not evil.” This Christian lie is a monstrosity, fit only for resigned stoics and despairing appeasers. Jewish scripture is replete with countless examples of prophets sword in hand fighting what they saw as evil - not least foreign oppressors. The real Jesus preached the ‘good news’ within the militant Jewish tradition against evil but also in all probability against personal vendettas and tit-for-tat revenge. He was determined to save every ‘lost sheep of Israel’, including social outcasts and reprobates such as the hated tax collectors, for the coming apocalypse. The army of righteousness needed repenters.
After the execution of John the Baptist Jesus revealed himself to be not simply a prophetic ‘preparer of the way’, but the messiah. “Whom say ye that I am?” Jesus asks his disciples. “Thou art the christ,” answers Peter. This was an extraordinary claim, but one inside the Jewish thought-world. He was not and would not have been considered mad. Before, there had been prophets and even prophet-rulers (Moses and Samuel), but never a messiah-king: ie, the final king. In Jesus the spiritual and secular would be joined. The bold idea must have “aroused tremendous enthusiasm in his followers, and great hope in the country generally” (H Maccoby Revolution in Judaea 1973, p163). Perhaps this explains why after he was cruelly killed on a Roman cross the Jesus movement - the Nazerenes - refused to accept that he had really died. His claimed status put him in myth terms at least on a par with Elijah; he would return at the appointed hour to lead them to victory.
New Testament (re)writers are at pains to water down or deny Jesus’s royal title. It was to openly rebel against Rome. Instead they use terms like ‘messiah’ or ‘christ’, which they portray as being other-worldly. The Jews, and the disciples, are shown as not understanding the concept, though it arose from their own sacred writings and collective consciousness. Nevertheless even in the gospels truth occasionally shines through. Pilate mockingly has Jesus crowned with thorns and has ‘king of the Jews’ inscribed on his cross. So, even if we use the bible, as long as we add a bit of imagination and a bit of common sense, it is not hard to discover the course of Jesus’ brief revolutionary career. The account of the so-called transfiguration on Mount Hermon described in Mark was no mystical event, but the crowning (or anointing) of King Jesus by his closest disciples, Peter, James and John. Like Saul, David and Solomon the new king was through the ceremony “turned into another man” (I Samuel x, 6).
Having been crowned, the prophet-king began a royal progress towards his capital Jerusalem. Jesus has 12 close disciples accompanying him - representing the so-called 12 tribes of Israel, and sends out 70 more into “every city and place” - the Jewish law-making council, the Sanhedrin, had 70 members. From Mount Hermon the royal procession makes its way through Galilee, then to the east bank of the Jordan and Peraea before reaching Jericho. King Jesus has a huge following and is greeted by vast crowds. Finally he triumphantly enters Jerusalem - either during the spring Passover or more likely in the autumn festival of the Tabernacles. The timing would be crucial. He symbolically rides upon an ass’s foal (thus fulfilling the prophesy of Zechariah ix, 9). There is no doubt what the masses - many of them festival pilgrims - think. They greet Jesus with unrestrained joy as ‘son of David’ and ‘king of Israel’ - royal titles. Palm branches are strewn before him and, showing their defiance of Rome, they cry out ‘hosanna’ - ‘save us’.
With the help of the masses Jesus and his lightly armed men force their way to the temple. The religious police are easily dispersed. There he rededicates it, drives out the money-changers and the venal Sadducee priesthood (the majority of priests carry on with their duties). The Romans and their agents would have viewed the events as a nuisance rather than much else. Rebellions at festival times were not uncommon. In possession of the temple area and actively shielded by popular support from the poor quarter of Jerusalem, he waited seven days for the apocalyptic coming of god’s kingdom. It was meant to come on the eighth. At the last supper he expectantly says: “I will drink no more of the fruit of the vine until that day I drink it in the new kingdom of god.” Yet, though he prayed his heart out in Gethsemane, it did not come. A cohort of Roman soldiers (300-600 men), and officers of the Jewish high priest, did.
Jesus was easily captured. His disciples had only two swords (Luke). Interrogated by the high priest, Jesus was quickly handed over to Pilot as a political prisoner. Without fuss or bother Jesus was found guilty of sedition - he was calling for non-payment of Caesar’s taxes and had proclaimed himself king of the Jews. Jesus had no thought or intent of delivering himself up as a sacrificial lamb. He had expected an awesome miracle and glory, not total defeat. The gospels report his silence and what must have been utter dejection. Pilate might well have been besieged by the Jerusalem mob. But they would have been crying for Jesus’ freedom, not “away with him, crucify him.” (John xv, 19). There was certainly no custom in occupied Palestine whereby the population could gain the liberty of a condemned prisoner. Pilate did not seek to “release him”, nor did the Jews demand his execution. After whipping, beating and spitting upon him, Pilate had Jesus thrown into a dungeon. Then, perhaps after a number of months, had him sent to an agonising death (Pilate may well have waited till the spring Passover festival so he could make Jesus an example before as many Jews as possible). The last words of Jesus are heart-rendering: ‘Eloi, eloi, lama sabachthani?’ (My god, my god, why hast thou forsaken me?)
Jesus was a brave revolutionary who staked all on divine intervention. When our time comes, we will not make that mistake. We communists recognise that the working class will have to liberate itself.